Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Kohlberg's moralising and its revival - character education

The Nazis and the Holocaust led Lawrence Kohlberg to focus
on the moral dimension of education. Drawing on the Socratic interest in values
and virtue, and John Dewey’s view of education as the development of the
individual, he saw education not as moral instruction but as the development of
moral judgement and behaviour. His inspiration was Piaget’s stages of development,
which he applied to the moral development of children and adults. His
theoretical work was matched by practical recommendations around the concept of
a ‘just community’. These could be schools, professions, social groups, even
prisons.

Three types of
educational theory

For Kohlberg there are three movements in educational
thinking:

1. Romanticism

2. Cultural transmission

3. Progessivism

Romanticism’s formative figure is Rousseau and this movement
sees the child as a natural learner, with institutions that often inhibit their
progress. Cultural transmission, the transfer of knowledge and values from one
generation to the next, attempts to preserves cultural capital. He saw focus on
the psychological aspects of learning, especially behaviourism, as well as the
use of technology, as typical of this movement. Progressivism, exemplified by
William James and John Dewy, sees education as an important contributor to
society, it’s cultural and democratic dimensions. Kohlberg was a ‘progressive’.

Six stages of moral
development

Building on Piaget’s (now discredited) stages of development:

Level 1 - Preconventional

1. Punishment and obedience orientation

2. Instrumental relativist orientation

Children think and behave egoistically, acting on potential
consequences, such as punishment. This self-interest can then develop into a
more instrumental outlook, where you see how others may help you promote your
own interests, as in receiving rewards for good behaviour.

Level 2 - Conventional

3. Interpersonal concordance orientation

4. Society maintaining orientation

Adolescents mature into this stage by obeying society’s
rules but without much reasoned reflection. Wanting to be liked or respected by
others makes one behave in ways in which groups approve. Recognition of the ‘good’
and ‘bad in relation to adherence to the law also emerges.

Level 3 - Postconventional

5. Social contract orientation

6. Universal ethical principles

At this level, individuals use their own ethical principles
to make judgement and do not simply adhere to external norms. There is a
recognition of diversity of moral perspectives and the resolution of moral
issue through democracy or other mechanisms of agreement. This may move on to
higher levels of abstraction about moral principles, such as justice and
rights, where individuals see themselves as like others in mutually agreed
action.

Individuals move through these stages, none are skipped, we
hardy ever go back, we can hold back but not accelerate stage development. He
used Piaget’s notion of changing schemata, mental constructs that make sense of
experience, that determine the limits of moral reasoning. New experiences are
either assimilated (integrated without major change) or accommodated (new schemata
created).

New stages are more complex and high-level. Cognitive
disequilibrium forces change as new experiences cause cognitive conflict. The
conflict is resolved by the creation of new cognitive schemata.

In addition to drawing upon theoretical ideas from Piaget
and John Rawls, he researched the hypothetical stages using Moral Judgement
Interviews (MJI) where moral problems are presented and the reasoning, not
conclusions, studied. Interviews were conducted every three years over twenty
years and, he claims, confirmed his six-stage theory. Further research across
forty countries also conformed, he claimed, its cross-cultural validity.

These six
stages of moral development were highly influential and teachers were
encouraged to use teaching tactics appropriate to these stages, curriculum
recommendations were made and a real movement emerged around staged moral
development.

Criticism

The basic
idea that moral reasoning lies at the root of or plays the primary role in moral
behavior is rejected by many intuitionists. Many came to see Kohlberg’s interpretation
as no more than that, the ‘interpretation’ of basically intuitive moral
judgment. Subsequent research showed that both Paiget’s and Kohlberg’s stages
were wrong, so wrong that the very idea of the Kohlberg framework had to be
adjusted. However, the adjustments proved so extreme that the framework had to
be abandoned in favour of other possible approaches. Elliot Turiel thought that
the moral development process was also massively fuelled by social convention.
There was an amusing interlude when Carol Gillighan took a huge gender swiped
at Kohlberg in her book "In a
Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development" (1982).
She made the reasonable point that his research had only involved males and
that Kohlberg was simply reinforcing stereotypical male character traits. She
had a point but simply replaced Kohlberg with another set of character traits
around a morality of care. It had all gone to pot. There is also the tricky
issue that multiple stages can be observed in the same individuals.

Conclusion

Kohlberg’s developmental psychology, as applied to the moral
sphere, brought an important, dynamic dimension into moral education. Yet, like
many staged processes, it proved to be too rigid and has crumbled somewhat due
to subsequent research. The role of institutional education in the teaching of
ethics remains problematic, as religious pressures and the roles of other
agents, such as families, peer-groups and the media play important roles.

Morph into character teaching

More
recently the moral issue has changed into n interest in ‘character’ education.In practice, deep, political roots of moral
and character education really lie in conservative worries about cultural and
moral decline. Every older generation has its views that the world is going to
the dogs and that we must bring back some golden age of high character (usually
theirs) to tame this feral, new, non-conformist generation.

In the US
the character education movement is often pushed by conservative and religious
sources that see the creep of liberal values as equivalent to moral decline.
The religious lobby, in particular, has been successful in pushing this agenda.
The most recent Federal example was G. W. Bush, who saw it as essential
component of educational policy. In the UK we have an entirely different, and
hugely influential stream of thought that comes originally from Thomas Arnold
and the public school system. Let’s call it the ‘playing fields of Eton’
complex, but anyone who has experience in the UK system knows exactly what this
is. With a hugely disproportionate number of politicians and civil servants
coming from a public-school background, this tradition is stronger in the UK
than almost any other comparable nation. There is constant pressure to see the
state system as dysfunctional and if we could only take some of the magic dust
from the private schools and scatter it down upon the teachers in the state
system, all would be well.

Character as a
subject

The Dfe talks of “the teaching of character as a separate
subject”. However, there is no evidence for this at all. In fact there is
plenty of evidence to show that this type of teaching has no effect whatsoever.
The teaching of character and values, if they can be ‘taught’ at all is a bold
claim.

Let’s start with the big one, certainly the one with the
biggest title, ‘Efficacy of Schoolwide Programs to Promote Social and Character
Development and Reduce Problem Behavior in Elementary School Children’ a report
from the Social and Character Development Research Program(2010). It looked at seven SACD programs and
20 student and school outcomes, all on social and character development and concluded that
school-based character education programs produce no measurable improvements in
student behaviour or academic performance. This was an astonishing result from
a large and well designed piece of research. In fact there are no peer-reviewed
studies that support the idea that character teaching has a positive,
measurable effect.

Character as conformity

Character and conformity are easily confused. Far from
shaping ‘character’ in schools, we should be doing the opposite and encouraging
students to question these norms and become autonomous learners, able to
distinguish between moral inculcation, based on assumed social norms, from more open tolerant approaches to
education. It is by no means clear that the character traits of teachers is the
right model or that teachers know what character traits are and how to teach
them.

Character and schools

In fact,
character education has been a feature of many totalitarian, religious and
repressive systems, as character is moulded to match particular ideologies. In
the US this of often a route for conservative, religious education. In China,
the Confucian system, which is strongly character driven, pushes students
towards a highly conformist, non-critical form of rote learning. In Islamic
states a strictly conformist and literal form of the Koran is used to shape
character. Private schools with a narrow socio-economic group is likely to promote
character in terms of that group. In truth, unless a school system is truly
secular (and arguably even then) character education reflects the cultural
norms of that school. In the UK, with the rise of faith schools, this has
already caused considerable problems.

Conclusion

When a
politician talks about ‘character’, my heart sinks. It’s like Jimmy Saville
taking a line on sex education – he’s an expert of sorts, just the wrong sort.
Politicians love to meddle in educational practice, in a way they would never
in say, medical practice. That’s because they think of themselves as ideals and
whatever ‘they’ experienced in education must be good for the rest of us. This
explains their obvious disengagement from the voters and blindness when it
comes to judgments on the role of character in education, even the world at
large. Let’s put this rather odd ‘C-word’ back where it came from, in the files
marked ‘bad theory’, ‘old-school thinking’ and ‘political conceit’.

3 Comments:

Thank you for the post, Donald Clark. I've been studying *character* for about 20 years now. Early on, from a philosophical perspective; more recently, from an evolutionary perspective. You might be interested in my book Making Mind: Moral Sense and Consciousness. The original title had *individual consciousness*. I spend some time in the book on Denis Krebs, a student of Kohlberg's and what he came to see about morality under Kholberg's system. Gregory F. Tague

Kohlberg's theory has been field tested over the decades, and confirmed time and again. It's one of the most well confirmed psychological theories available, almost a golden standard in an area so full of hypothesis without any experimental support. Therefore, I have difficulty with your affirmation that it was "so wrong that the very idea of the Kohlberg framework had to be adjusted ... [and then] abandoned in favour of other possible approaches."

Sure, there are difficulties with it, particularly when it comes to analyzing higher stages. And sure, there are criticisms. But, outright abandoned? Despite the lack of strong falsifications despite it being fully falsifiable? Despite all the confirmations on top of the lack of falsifications? Hard to believe.

For instance, I see you mentioned Gilligan. I like her theory (and think it makes for a nice ethical framework for "stage 5+"'s virtue ethicists), but it was one of those that taken at face value, then put to test, didn't come out confirmed. So, why mention it if the idea is to show Kohlberg's as a failed theory? It's the opposite: Kohlberg's showed itself so strong that Gilligan's alternative is the one that got experimentally falsified.

I'm not sure about the other authors you mention, but I'd really like to know more about the experimental research you mention proved Kohlberg was wrong. If you could provide some links and references to these studies, in particular something showing how much better they explain Kohlberg's collected evidence, I'd be very thankful. Because, really, this comes as a great surprise, if it's indeed the case.

Thanks Andrew. The fundamental objection, and one I agree with, is the considerable evidence for intuition, as opposed to reason, in moral actions. Post-rationalisation is, in my view and the view of many such as Jonathon Haidt. It was Haidt who found that people post rationalise to manage expectations and remain coherent, not that reason underlay moral action. In other words the experimental models are seriously flawed. Others have found that one person can have several stages in their worldview. I also think that having male only subjects is a serious experimental flaw. Many other objections....